Entire Plot of Ice Cube's 'War of the Worlds' Recreated Using Only Quotes From Scathing Reviews
Ice Cube stars in an HG Wells adaptation apparently shot during the pandemic and shelved. UNTIL NOW.
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Did you know that Ice Cube stars in a straight-to-Prime Video adaptation of War of the Worlds that premiered this past week? I had no idea until about five minutes before I started this post, when someone posted this clip over on BlueSky:
Judging solely by what I could tell from the 49-second clip, Cube’s line reads are, as always, suitably high energy and dynamic (this is the man who gave us “it’s snakes out dere dis big??” after all), but beyond that, it has the feel of a corporate video produced for Amazon, with a plot that seems to hinge on Prime Shipping. Jenkins, I need that thumb drive like yesterday! Yes, sir, thank God for one-click buying, sir!
You wouldn’t think that the world’s richest man would need to bankroll an entire movie just to shill for his own products on his own streaming network, but alas: the depths of the billionaire class’s perversions as ever seem bottomless.
In any case, as soon as I saw the clip I decided I needed to know more. The film, as it turns out, was announced during the pandemic, with Ice Cube set to star, in a production set to be helmed by music video director and frequent Eminem collaborator Rich Lee. Timur Bekmambetov, of Wanted fame, was set to produce (the Bek Mamba, I call him).
The pandemic was, of course, five years ago, and at some point between now and then, “Universal Pictures let it rot on a shelf for four years before passing it off to Prime Video.” (via The Telegraph).
As you might guess, it generally isn’t good movies that go years between production and release, barring complex legal issues. Usually this happens with movies the distributor assumes will tank and/or hides out of embarrassment. I have been covering movies for close to 20 years now. I currently have upwards of 64,000 unread emails. Searching “war of the worlds” reveals zero.
Fast forward to this past week when the movie finally hit Prime Video. The reactions have been slowly trickling in ever since.
All in all, War of the Worlds (2025) struck me as a perfect candidate for Plot Recreated with Reviews, a feature in which we try to recreate the entire plot of a bad movie using only expository quotes from the reviews (no analysis!). The idea is that, in certain cases, it’s weirdly more fun to hear a movie explained by people who hated it than actually watch it.
Movies that a studio tried to bury usually work great for this, but War of the Worlds (2025) in particular also illustrates why that can also make this feature a challenge. I usually read 20 or 30 or more reviews to try to cobble together this feature, but War of the Worlds (2025) was so successfully buried that there were only 13 total reviews of it on RottenTomatoes, and at least a third of those were YouTube reviews, which are useless for our purposes here. Thus, you won’t see outlets like the New Yorker and Vulture and the New York Times on the source list this time around, but suffice it to say, I did my best.
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The Entire Plot of War of the Worlds (2025) Recreated with Quotes from Scathing Reviews
“No previous adaptation has extracted every trace of excitement from HG Wells’s science fiction staple so thoroughly as music video director Rich Lee’s appalling new War of the Worlds, which relays the action via the dull medium of Zoom cameras, phone streams and Google Maps read-outs.” (Telegraph)
“Even with a Prime subscription, you have to sit through two minutes of ads to watch 90 more of what amounts to a feature-length commercial for all things Amazon.” (Variety)
“It’s two hours of watching a guy click around on his computer screen.” (GiantFreakinRobot)
ACT I
“[The action] primarily unfolds through the computer of government surveillance expert” (Cinemalogue)
“Will (Ice Cube), the chief (and only?) domestic terrorism analyst in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).” (ScreenAnarchy)
“Will sits alone in front of his computer, grimacing into the camera as he proactively monitors the many systems put in place to surveil American citizens.” (Variety)
“In the top right corner of the picture, we do see a headshot of Ice Cube in his office, but they didn’t spend the money to seat him in an actual cubicle. It’s an obvious green screen.” (GFR)
“Will works alone in a large, nondescript office, entirely alone in the DHS building--perhaps all the other employees have already been deported?—this allows him to divide his time equally between safeguarding the security of the entire nation and spying obsessively on his two children.” (Screen Anarchy)
“Will’s a widower who’s had it tough, unable to relinquish control of his grown children, including gamer Dave (Henry Hunter Hall) and science student Faith (Iman Benson), who’s also pregnant with her first child, married to Amazon delivery driver Mark (Devon Bostick).” (BluRay.com)
“He has a camera in her fridge, presumably to check her Yakult stocks.” (Empire)
“Meanwhile, William is on the hunt for Disruptor, an Anonymous-style online entity looking to reveal Goliath, a secret U.S. Government surveillance program, to the world.” (BluRay.com)
“Juggling video calls with his boss (Clark Gregg) and Agent Jeffries (Andrea Savage) in the field, Will tracks Disruptor’s signal, shares the location with his colleagues and monitors the raid in real time.” (Variety)
NASA Scientist Eva Longoria
“However, plans to find the culprit and deal with his children are put aside, as William faces a new threat after alien ‘tripods’ arrive on Earth to destroy humanity.” (BluRay.com)
“NASA something-or-other Sandra Salas (Eva Longoria) had warned Will that something was off, but ‘I watch people, not weather,’ he growled back. Now he’s seeing people wiped out by an unprecedented meteor shower — but only when they’re conscientious enough to point their camera phones in the right direction.” (Variety)
“Fireballs streak across the sky, smashing buildings and causing chaos everywhere.” (Variety)
“The aliens begin to crash into Earth, hiding metal death machines inside meteors,” (BluRay.com)
“…emerging in those iconic three-legged vehicles. As for the visual effects, it's probably a good thing that much of the alien tech is seen in smaller windows inside the desktop frame. Even that can't hide how herky-jerky their movements are or how their laser blasts come across as bold lines copied, pasted, and deleted in some rudimentary graphics program.” (MarkReviewsMovies)
“The Martians and their tripods look like they were churned out on a shoestring (and possibly a Sinclair ZX81).” (Telegraph)
[Editor’s Note: I’m not familiar with the Sinclair ZX81 but I’m nonetheless going to interpret this as a sick burn.]
“Yet, as the world seems to be falling apart and in-between briefing POTUS, Will mostly ignores the carnage and diverts all his resources to checking on the safety of his kids. More than any of the weightier themes the script invokes, this is what War Of The Worlds, 2025 edition, is really about: it takes a full-on alien attack causing global devastation to teach Will he needs to let go of his grown-up children.” (Empire)
Help, Computer
“Lee doesn’t have the budget to really bring these towering threats to life anyway, mostly focusing on Will’s reactions to the chaos that’s erupting outside his office (the movie doesn’t explain why he has his own camera on the whole time).” (BluRay.com)
“The highlight of this War of the Worlds is when Ice Cube clicks around on Google Maps. All those streets whizzing by as he types in an address…” (GFR)
“…we watch him frantically texting and making Zoom calls” (GFR)
“…plenty of scenes where characters yell into the phones and William furiously points-and-clicks his way into action,” (BluRay.com)
“and Amazon gets mentioned every 10 seconds.” (ScreenAnarchy)
“Then come the news reports, which supply updates on the global military response (basically, stock footage of soldiers doing soldier-y things, like loading missiles onto jets and jumping out of planes).” (Variety)
“There is occasionally grainy footage of some sort of alien attack action happening on one of the tabs behind his Facebook page, but that’s as close as this film gets to being a movie.” (GFR)
The King of Reaction Shots
“Cube isn’t exactly a master thespian, and War of the Worlds mostly keeps his performance to a series of ‘damn!’ and ‘oh, hell no’ responses while the supporting players all work with their own phones, trying to sell the bigness of the situation without actually showing it.” (BluRay.com)
“The rapper has two expressions: a resting scowl and nuclear overreaction, neither of which suggest the sort of individual the government would trust with the technology to eavesdrop on anyone he sees fit.” (Variety)
“After the extra terrestrials gatecrash, he is reduced to shouting things like, ‘Take your intergalactic asses back home!’ all the time.” (Telegraph)